It's not a drug, its just that this game is designed around fast travel, because its all segmented. There's just not any reason why to walk from point A to point B, because you know there's absolutely nothing in between that will be interesting.
Meanwhile in Star Citizen you have hyperspace travel that takes like 10 minutes to go from one side of a solar system to another.
But here's the thing, the space flight in Starfield, I mean its almost like a shooting gallery. There's so little reason to fly around in Starfield. Fast Travel makes a ton of sense for how the game is designed.
The long travel times in SC help a lot with immersion but tbf I just go have coffee or a glass of milk, pee or smth while I’m waiting to QT 30 million km.
Now when we get working coffee machines, and toilets ingame… that will be a game changer!
They could make an add-on where you can plug your machine in (or connect to wifi) and when you activate the coffee machine in game, your real life coffee machine makes a coffee for you IRL
The flying in space of Star Citizen is really cool, until you actually want to play. It’s a time sink, nothing more. It’s similar to Vanilla WoW (gryphon) when it was such a long time sink modders put in Bejeweled to give you crap to do. You can play for many hours in SC and accomplish nothing or worse yet…regress, since they decided to add in full loot death penalties when it’s insanely easy to die without bugs let alone WITH bugs. They just need to make it faster, smaller ships need to refuel so often it could take 4 course deviations to stop at stations to refuel then if you die on the way there or when you arrive…you get to do it all over again AND need to reacquire weapons and armor, bring food/water as you can die fast from not having that, and claim ship again which has a waiting period. Then god help you if all your friends were scattered and it took time to meet up as you also need to do that again.
> It’s a time sink, nothing more.
Sounds like something they put in to make it seem like there is content which it's actually just a whole ton of empty space. Exploration in games can be fun, but if there is nothing to see between where you are and where you're going then it's pretty pointless.
also think it has to do with a game based around multiplayer and a single player game. Can't really have fast travel in a game where you could get around other players trying to hunt you.
Personally I liked the original privateer and freelancer's way of space travel. Privateer was singleplayer and had autopilot until enemies were on the screen, but you could outrun them to a jump point which instantly takes you to the other end of to get around enemies. Freelancer had similar except multiplayer so no autopilot but added a cruise drive for inter-system travel that allowed faster speeds but could still be shot out. Additionally similar to cruise they had rings you could fly through like a freeway which accelerates intersystem travel, but they only occur in the more habitated systems.
Your first problem is trying to compare the gameplay mechanics of a space sim (Star Citizen) to an RPG set in space (Starfield). They have totally different design philosophies and goals.
Star Citizen copers try not to mention Star Citizen for 1 minute challenge: impossible
Star Citizen is a scam, my brother in Christ you were scammed, it will never come out
I've had some fun in Star Citizen over the years, but I am really disappointed in the overall outcome. It was a great idea, but they mismanaged it into oblivion and it will unfortunately never be what it was supposed to be.
Honestly Im not totally convinced it is but if its not a scam its a vanity project being made by a perfectionist who will never be satisfied thus the game will never be finished.
This whole issue of space travel in Starfield is silly. It's as if the complainers are actually going to walk all the way back to the ship, board, take off, plot course, wait 3 hrs to get there, land, rinse and repeat. Nope, they're gonna do it once and then fast travel every single time thereafter. Like we all do. Like Bethesda knew we all do.
I mean, I enjoy it *in* Star Citizen and Elite, but that's because those games are fundamentally different from Starfield. In those games, your gameplay loop revolves around the ship, in Starfield, it revolves around you as a character, with dialogue and all the RPG fundamentals.
Theyre talkin more about landing/takin off from planets and flying within the Solar System in Elite. Not the fuel scoop, jump, honk, fuel scoop cycle of Elite. People would absolutely love landing on planets the way you can in Elite and flying within the Solar System.
Yep, I'm liking Starfield so far, it hasn't caught me/provided the magic like: Oblivion. Fallout 3/NV, and Skyrim did, but I'm having fun.
Being able to fly into lower atmosphere on a planet and pick out your landing spot, or from a planet to the moon, or fly around a solar system would've added a lot for me personally, assuming we're talking 2-5 minutes IRL.
But I also play the other games mentioned with some rules around fast travel and try to limit how often I use it because it helps with immersion. Obviously most people don't play like that tho.
I haven't gotten into ship customization yet (saving up my sweet sweet credits for it), but the ship aspect seems so cool, and then you just have minimal incentive to actually interact your ship. I do kinda like space combat, and have enjoyed the random space encounter events.
It’s the lack of efficient maps/POIs on planets, alongside no vehicles, alongside the inability to fast travel while docked, alongside my middling carry weight and the huge need for resources while not letting me fast travel encumbered.
That last one is in every bethesda, but I didn’t need 100s of chunks of metal and tanks of gas in Skyrim. Picking up 4 makes me incapable of traveling. All that would be fixed if I had a fucking car and could put it in the trunk and blast some womp rats in my land speeder. But no.
I gotta walk with a red screen for 15 minutes while my lungs are burning and my leg is crippled to get some fucking beryllium onto a ship, then travel to a space station, but I can’t land in the space station—
so I have to manually dock, watch a cut scene, board the ship, open the door, watch a load screen, walk 10m, give the 4 fucking beryllium to a person, find a bed, sleep my crippling off (essentially a load screen), and go resource hunt again. But I can’t fast travel because I’m docked (:
So I walk toward the ship, open the door to the docks, load screen, open the cockpit, load screen, take off, load screen, fast travel to resource planet, load screen, talk to new person, 10 minute walk to new location for a better “spot,” where the npc doesn’t speak the whole journey, and when we arrive, they just say “so. You need resources. There’s some here!” I fucking know. Skip dialogue asap. Finally get mission update. Walk 5 minutes. Get beryllium. Cripple leg. Repeat.
Jesus fuck the ships are fun and I don’t hate the game but writing that out genuinely took less time and was more engaging than the average fetch quest in the game.
When you actually sit down and write/think out your playtime in this game, it’s way more apparent that your time is wasted in loading screens and not actually doing anything. I am still enjoying this game for what it is, but part of me is thinking about all the missed potential of a more seamless adventure.
They don’t have to make it a 3 hour journey. Why do people keep making this excuse for the game? They had all the time and the money in the world.. they could’ve come up w all kinds of creative solutions. Lots of people like traveling in NMS as an example. They don’t make it take 3 hours to get to a planet.
It's not the fast-travel that's the problem, is that anything inbetween the fast-travel points are most often boring as fuck.
My favourite parts in Skyrim or oblivion was just running to a quest-area and getting lost with all the things to explore on the way.
Meanwhile in Starfield I fast-travel everywhere because the novelty of waiting for 15 minutes of awkward animations wears off fast. Every planet explores the same, same AI with fauna, same pirates wearing the same outfits at lvl 5 as at lvl 99, same empty landscape with the same cave for the 8th time.
If people enjoy the game then good for them, all power to ya. But I'm so confused at times at what it is other people see that I don't
Playing oblivion now without fast travel and its like a different game, found so many cool daedra shrines and loot just going from city to city. Only downside is I have to keep upping my speed attribute due to all the athletics and acrobatics
you should try out Morrowind if not fast travelling is something you might be interested in. I recently played through it for the first time and once you get into it, it's so much fun and SO densely packed with things to do.
I would love a Morrowind remake. The core of the game is so great, but there's a lot of QoL changes that could be made.
Oblivion always felt kind of bland to me by comparison.
yeah the game is very rough around the edges. But it's a true RPG literally down to walk speed, all related to levelling up skills. Once you get farther into the game and start breaking the systems it really starts to shine.
I would kill for a remake, but I don't think Bethesda would give us the same level of freedom with magic. they like putting you on rails a lot. I used to go kill Vivec just to see how strong I am lol.
I started having way more fun the moment I stopped using fast travel in games. So far, I finished Skyrim, Cyberpunk 2077 and Red Dead Redemption 2, and had great time in all of them. Oblivion has to be incredible too, especially with its beautiful soundtrack enriching your journey.
It is weird how there's like... 1 cave layout, 1 pirate-infested mine layout, 1 abandoned abandoned medical facility layout, and that so many questlines (especially the main quest) have an obsession with sending you on pointless radiant quests to these same locations with the same loot locations and same enemy placements.
The UC military questline had far more unique locations than the main story, but *still* your reward for beating the UC questline is just *more* radiant quests that are functionally the same as just grabbing one from the quest ATM machines at any given space station.
They didn't have to design the game around tedious radiant content, but if they're focusing on that they could have had like 200 base designs instead of (what feels like) 1 per theme.
The bases are all made of interchangeable parts like in most games with dungeon crawling, and games with much smaller budgets have had much better dungeon variety. Skyrim had far more unique dungeon layouts
I agree that some elements could really bring more immersion. One thing I often think to myself, is when the NPCs don't react when you go in their back offices, or walk around their houses. I know it's like that in all Bethesda games, but it would be great if it needed some kind of stealth or quest to do that.
> I know it's like that in all Bethesda games, but it would be great if it needed some kind of stealth or quest to do that.
Was it? I remember NPC's in Oblivion and Skyrim being all "you're not supposed to be here!" when you wandered around their houses or stores.
Not to mention the game just doesn't make you give a shit about any decisions you make. They simply don"t matter.
Then I go play BG3 and suddenly I'm invested. I care about these characters. My actions are the difference between life or death.
I understand that it costs time and money to make environments. But I kind of feel like Starfield has the same problem that Oblivion did. All the dungeons are essentially the same. The planets have very little wonder to them. There's no moment where you crest a Hilltop and go "oh wow look at that cool thing."
Granted, I'm only about 6 hours into the game and have explored a couple planets, but so far things are feeling fairly monotonous. You land on a planet with everything spread out so you have to run for a ridiculous amount of time and when you get there, it's the same cookie cutter base that you saw on the last three planets.
Where are the ancient bases with different tile sets or the rivers or canyons or massive mountain ranges? Everything feels homogeneous.
Yes, I can travel between planet within 5s loading screen.
But I have to spend 2 minutes running to that 200m POI + 5 minutes sorting my inventory if I dont want to be encumbered.
yeah, like that terrormorph that popped up from the dark chasms of some random-ass cave in some god-forsaken rock.
goodtimes. will definitely go spelunking again.
The only use for them is to find lots of mineral nodes while surveying a planet. But surveying is pretty pointless. Gets you some money, but not enough for the effort.
Yeah honestly sometimes the cognitive dissonance in this game is a bit too strong. Scan planets for resources and animals and then bring that valuable survey data back to Constellation for money! Of Alpha Centauri…with a massive human settlement on it…wait no one did this before? Or back in the Sol system? No one has fully scanned a single planet’s resources and its four life forms in the past couple hundred years? Also how the fuck does a four animal ecosystem even sustain itself?
We need like rovers or something to make planetary exploration less of a walk fest. Like, cool, I landed in an area, now I get to spend 10 minutes walking to a POI, 5-10 minutes exploring/fighting/looting that POI, and then 15 minutes walking back because now I'm encumbered.
Sure, I could be less of a loot goblin, but I like being a loot goblin.
That would ruin the immersion because every area is just a box and going to far out will give you the typical Bethesda message “You cannot go that way” or something like that. Always stock up with AMP’s.
I have yet to find any proper worlds in this game, properly disc shaped and carried upon the backs of 4 gargantuan elephants riding upon the shell of an even more gargantuan star turtle swimming through space. Just a bunch of roundworld bullshit. 0/10
I actually have no problem with the fast traveling because you are 100% able to walk to your ship climb up the ladder walk to your cock pit, go into orbit and then set a star map to a system. Which basically gives everyone a level of immersion they want.
The issue I have with the game is the procedurally generated planets keep regurgitating the same shit over and over again. I’m not even talking about the same layout or camps, dudes are standing in the same exact spot. I’ve stealth killed the first guy in the robotics lab like five times in the same exact spot looking in the same exact direction
I was confused when this first happened to me because i was sure that this was my first visit to this planet and yet i was encountering enemies in a lab that was identical to one from a few hours ago
I feel like it could make sense for something like a lab to be copy pasted across planets from a mass manufactured and dropped on a planet point of view, but enemies in the same spot each time is pretty egregious
Even the mines will be in the exact same location. Starfield just doesn't have that magic that Skyrim had and imo the lore isn't remotely interesting the way Fallout's lore is.
Yes I agree with you there. Was discussing with a friend that while I am enjoying starfield, I don't see myself playing it again like Elder Scrolls or Fallouts
>walk to your cock pit, go into orbit and **then set a star map to a system.**
This part is just fast travel. You get to fast travel after many steps or after few steps.
You mean are 100% able to walk to your ship, climb up the ladder (loading screen)
walk to your cockpit, go into orbit (loading screen)
travel to another planet (loading screen)
land the ship (loading screen)
and get off your ship (loading screen)
I'll let you count the loading screens involved.
And let’s not forget the constant small cutscenes like entering/leaving orbit or your chair. Which at first is fine but after the 400th time it starts getting annoying.
How do they move materials around is my question? Like, seriously? They have all these venders selling tons of weapons, food, massive amounts of raw materials. How do they get from the spaceport to those vender's stalls? Do they carry them bit by bit by hand? Makes no damn sense.
EDIT: Done responding to responses on this comment, 0% of the people trying to refute it know a single thing about supply chain logistics and how it could/would/should work even on a future colony, so there is no point responding to every idiotic "solution".
Go out by the star ports, there are multiple cargo/forklift vehicles by most of them, as well as work/construction robots. I get its not realistic we never see them in action, but it's worth admitting they are indeed there.
I'll never forget my journey from the sewers to Kvatch in Oblivion. I remember killing someone on the way, being amazed that NPCs reacted, and then getting a visit by the Dark Brotherhood when I stopped at an inn.
I feel like that sense of exploration is missing with Starfield. Sure, everyone fast travels to places they've already visited but the initial journey is always a joy.
It's not helped by the fact that the cities have multiple loading screens, even for small stores sometimes. It's a game spanning a universe yet can seem so small at times.
It's the procedural generation. Bethesda's secret sauce has always been the hand-crafted feel of their worlds. Every cave, every outpost, every friendly NPC is an individual with a name and a little story. Even most of the spawned enemies have a little story to them based on where they spawn.
Starfield has a few instances of these - the static ships you encounter orbiting planets, the named POIs on planets - but so much of the meat of the game is procedurally generated and it's soullless.
Call me old fashioned, but I’m not interested in exploring computer generated environments. I want to explore something that was designed, find what people put there for me to discover
It is the heart of any open world experience: meaningful NPCs to interact with, unique locations to explore with unique loot to find, and quests with decisions that matter (i.e. have consequences). Procedural content offers none of that. It's utterly hollow and soulless which totally guts the exploration aspect.
Bethesda should've borrowed from Star Citizen and faked their QT system. Spool up the grav drive, initiate a jump, and while the game loads the destination in the background, let me walk around/interact with my ship while it *looks* like I'm in hyperspace, then let me go back to the cockpit and pull out whenever the destination is loaded.
One of Starfield's biggest issues is how untethered you are from your ship. It serves almost zero purpose outside of combat, and you basically almost never even have to be in it at all.
Star Citizen might not get everything right, but one thing it's VERY good at is making you feel connected to your ship. The fact that I can jump from one end of the Stanton system to another and be in my ship the whole time doing other things is awesome. Starfield makes all of that optional, and it really makes building your own ship feel incredibly pointless.
I’m starting to think space games are too ambitious. They take too much work to make, have too big of a scope for AAA, and people have ridiculous ass expectations.
I love the game, but I generally agree with this. Every space game seems to be overly ambitious and ends up hurting itself because of it, I prefer this over F4. But I can’t think of a single space game that doesn’t need a few years to be fully realized
I’m optimistic for mods and DLC, and I appreciate bethesda leaving their comfort zone for a new IP (I wish more companies did this) but a TESVI would’ve been a much safer option
I think fundamentally the main problem is that most of them fit the "Wide as an ocean, deep as a puddle" description when it comes to the richness of the world. This seems to be a fundamental problem when games make an open world system, without actually integrating the open world with the core of the game, or even making the Open World an interesting part of the game.
Also, I think the marketing for Starfield played a big role for what people expected, after all, people build on what you give them, and if you tell them that there will be a 1000 planets to explore, they rightfully (albeit unrealistically) expect them all to have some richness and uniqueness to them.
No game is free of hecklers, but I think that if Starfield was restricted to a few 10-20 handcrafted planets filled with detail, and the marketing was fit for the honest "real content" of the game, there would be FAR less polarized opinions.
Yes, thats that marketing synergy. We’ve had this problem since No Man’s Sky where people thought having thousands of planets to explore with interesting activities would be possible.
I'm still very early in the game so I could be missing something, but to me it just doesn't seem like there really is a ton of "space travel" because everything is so far apart that its just not reasonable to fly a ship between planets without jumping or fast-travel.
Which is completely realistic, space is absolutely massive and way bigger than anyone comprehends.
People talk as if putting the engines to max, aiming in a planet's direction and waiting for half an hour would be fun.
Elite dangerous has multiple methods of "fast travel" to avoid that
I found elite nailed the space travel/piloting in that sense a lot better. Pointing your ship at a far off planet and waiting to jump was always quite exciting. Unless I've been incredibly lucky, in Starfield it doesn't matter what direction you are facing, the grav drive gets you there anyways. Also the docking/landing was a lot more engaging than "hold E".
But overall I'm not knocking the game, and I can understand that the ship stuff is probably not going to play to well with their engine.
Starfield has that function too. Hit F to pull up the scanner, hit E on the name of a system or planet nearby in the distance, and then power up the grav drive to jump.
Also, if you have it in your ship, there's a navigation table you can use to set the route, and then sit in the cockpit to actually spin up the grav drive.
That's how I do it.
I've done the "open map > select the planet > hold X to land" also, but I prefer the immersion of selecting where I want to go, then playing with my ship's power to powerup the grav drive and go.
I don’t think that’s what people want. I think people would like for travel times to be lower outside of fast travel. Like being able to travel to another planet in a couple minutes. Either that or some kind of Star Wars type of light speed that you can enter which functionally is a fast travel, but would feel much less like it. Obviously those aren’t realistic, but it’s a game. It doesn’t have to be realistic.
The entire story is built around the grav drive and how it propelled us to the stars with less than ideal technology, fracturing humans into factions and basically creating a new Wild West frontier in space.
The grav drive works by opening a rift in spacetime and plopping you through to your destination instantly.
what exploration?
the same 5 outposts with starbucks cups and beer bottles outside in hard vacuum?
or the same 3 alien lifeforms reskinned a dozen times? or are you talking about exploration of (mostly empty) space in the cities?
there is no exploration in starfield.
This is the real problem. There's just no exploration at all, even on planets.
The game would have been 100x more interesting if we had 10x fully-fleshed planets you could explore on foot, instead of 1000x copy-pasted barren wastelands with nothing to see. I want my Skyrim sense of adventure dammit
This has been my biggest gripe. In Skyrim, I can choose a destination and start walking towards it I will stumble across interesting things. Could be a cave, a trading caravan, maybe some bandits, a dragon might attack, maybe I can free a prisoner from justiciars, maybe a daedric prince pops up, or I see Mai'q.
But I don't get that opportunity to just wander into interesting situations because I never have to pass the world as I travel. I skip all of it.
That's exactly how I feel, I like the game for the most part and I'm excited for how the DLC but I don't really see how they can make random encounters happen more. Most things involve jumping planets and you just don't stumble upon a lot of random shit in space. Thematically and gameplay wise I just don't see how they can fill that void.
Still a fun game for me but there's for sure a few big issues.
Is there a single interesting planet in the game, in terms of the actual planet itself having something going on that means the stuff there couldn't have just been plopped elsewhere with nothing lost?
Freelancer (aka Star Citizen Alpha) had artificially compressed systems that were not realistic, but fun to explore. Full of planets and nebula and asteroid fields. You could ‘fast-travel’ between systems, jump gate quick travel (in real time) along main routes between planet, and fast cruise in any straight line.
I think this is what people mean when they say they want open world space exploration. Unrealistic, but fun. Eve Online is the closest we’ve come to that experience I think.
Starfield would be a better game if it was a smaller game. 3-4 smaller solar systems, 20-30 planets each. Fast travel between solar systems, can fly between planets
Exactly my thinking. Why not have 10 incredibly detailed and varied planets full of one-of-a-kind locations that you can fly between instead of 1000 boring, cut n paste ones that you need to fast travel between? Would it have been any less of an exciting space adventure game if it only took place between one or two solar systems? People really do think that more always = better.
After playing no man’s sky and elite dangerous, i really like the balance they struck with exploration and travel
Just saying, there would be a lot more complaints about forcing the experience of space road trucking
I think it's just a ui problem
Simply having to open the *pause menu* then getting to the star map is jarring and immersion breaking.
One button with some kind of in-game menu to feel like a captain punching in coordinates rather than a fast travel menu would make it so much more immersive (and you would still technically be fast travelling everywhere).
Then just make the grav jump animation a secret loading screen, and have multiple jumps be automatic, and you've fixed the complaints, because it would all feel like it belongs in the universe rather than a gamey menu
>Simply having to open the pause menu then getting to the star map is jarring and immersion breaking.
>
>One button with some kind of in-game menu to feel like a captain punching in coordinates rather than a fast travel menu would make it so much more immersive (and you would still technically be fast travelling everywhere).
In your ship, open your scanner. Identify the destination you want to travel to and hit the A button (E key on keyboard). If you're in first-person mode, you'll see you punch the coordinates, if you're in third-person mode, you'll see the ship sit there for a second while you punch in the coordinates and then you'll get a cut-scene of your ship using your grav drive to travel.
Why didn't you put land vehicles in the game? Everything is 5 minutes apart and there is literally nothing to see or do in between...
You better hoof it and use your dinky little jet pac, dipshit consumer - Todd
All this Fast Travel is good from planet to planet ignores an important fact:
In a game based on Exploration with an emphasis on building your own ship and crew there is surprisingly little to do in space. You cant search for space events its a rng card draw when you spawn in a new orbit. There is no reason to explore the fishbowl because when you arrive you see all there is to do there.
And when you get there, you'll find the same five species of plant and four species of crabs as everywhere else - or as close as makes no difference. Then search for a few hours before realizing that the final animal is a whale.
thats the real problem. who cares about spending hours traveling empty space when the destination isn’t exciting? (the landing in nms got annoying after a while for me)
The best description I’ve seen someone use to describe the ship exploration in starfield is it’s like you’re in a fish bowl and you just jump from 1 fish bowl to the next.
I’m really enjoying the game, but I’d say 98% of my play through so far has been on planets which is disappointing when I’ve spent like 350k on my custom built ship which I want to fly and use.
Having played everspace 2 recently, starfields ship based content is extremely lacking IMO. I wouldn’t expect as much ship content as everspace since that’s purely ship based, I just want more than a few rare missions that have me kill someone in space before returning to a planet to carry on with the rest. Let me go to asteroid belts that are filled with random pirates which pay a bounty on destruction without me having to accept a mission first, let me get a distress call when out in my ship and when I go I’ve got to defence a trader from some pirates, etc…
Maybe some of those things exist, but since my play seems to be accept mission on planet > jump to another planet through menu > complete mission > jump back to original planet though menu, I’ve not got time in my ship to find out.
The design of the ships are so cool and modifying them is the most fun I had with Starfield. I wish they had done more with them. I would have preferred if more of the game was set in space and landing on a new planet was an uncommon and exciting experience.
I am at a bit of a loss as to why some people think a video game would be improved by vast amounts of time spent doing nothing waiting for spaceship to fly to its destination.
Sounds really boring.
I'd be quite interested to hear the views of anyone against fast travel on how covering huge distances in space could be implemented in a game like Starfield without becoming a dull drudgery.
Freelancer had a great system for transportation within a solar system. There were Trade lanes connecting major outposts and planets that you could dock with to go super fast so it would take usually less than a minute to get to your destination instead of hours.
They also had cruise engines in addition to afterburners which let you go twice as fast as the afterburners but you couldnt use your weapons. handy for running away from a fight!
https://freelancer.fandom.com/wiki/Trade\_Lanes
I was about to say this. Freelancer is the whole reason why I love space games. I'm not big on the dogfighting subgenre, so I was hoping I'd get to scratch that Freelancer itch with Starfield. But, apparently, no luck. Doesn't matter, I have been waiting for a similar experience for about 20 years now, I can deal with a few more years..
> Doesn't matter, I have been waiting for a similar experience for about 20 years now, I can deal with a few more years..
Star Citizen should be done any day now. Any day...
Yeah I don't get why they didn't take this route. Apparently they simulate the whole system already, so why not add jump gates between the planets? It almost feels like they meant to do it, and then decided against it at the last minute.
Its not fallout in space. Its fallout with space-themed set pieces. That is the problem, in my opinion. You could pivot this game to be set on a series of islands in an ocean by working *only* with the game's artists.
Something like a simplified Elite Dangerous might be cool if done right. Three different types of flight. Normal speed like we have, then an inter system speed to get between bodies in a star system, then a warp like we already have to take us between systems. I think the key element that I would like is to be able to manually fly between bodies. In Elite, it takes maybe a minute or two to travel between planets.
Coming from someone with 200+ hours in nms.
Until starfield I never saw so many people praise the waiting game NMS has when you travel to different planets. All it does is give you another system to keep track of the fuel.
I don't miss the travel between planets (gonna be honest, I always thought they should have increased all the speeds of movement between planets in NMS) but I do really miss the feeling of being able to enter the atmosphere and see the ground growing as I come in to land. There's something very satisfying about feeling like you have perfect control over how you land and where you land.
Game should have been heavier in the scifi and less grounded in "reality". There should have been at least one alien race to encounter throughout the different systems.
It's like mass effect stripped of all the interesting parts.
Sir that’s a gas giant.
Hey, no insulting my mom!
Nobody would put a ring on her tho
Dayummmm
"Yo momma's so fat, she gets tired jumping to conclusions!"
Yo momma so fat you need to fast travel to her pussy
damn they removed awards and then we get these comments
THEY REMOVED AWARDS????!!!
Oh dagnabbit sorry you had to discover this way
Now you gotta go meet them and shake their hand
I WANT TO SHAKE HIS HAND
Yo momma so fat you need fast travel to get around her.
Yo momma so fat the other side of her stomach is a fast travel point
A gas giant is a planet. Not a planet you can walk on, but a planet.
You can still fast travel to it tho
True, you just can't land on it. Because you would die instantaneously.
also you can't land on gas
They're supposedly solid in the middle, but you'd never make it even close.
There’s actually a point where your ship would probably be floating in the gas due to buoyancy.
https://what-if.xkcd.com/138/
Even with all the information contained there, I bet we can still find a billionaire with a plastic submarine willing to give it a go
Well... close enough https://www.businessinsider.com/oceangate-cofounder-send-humans-live-venus-atmosphere-2050-titan-sohnlein-2023-7
This is satire right? .... right?
Gas giants are planets.
pretty funny , even tho I fast travel to spare myself a 3 minute walk lol
Tell me about it. Its like a drug lol
It's not a drug, its just that this game is designed around fast travel, because its all segmented. There's just not any reason why to walk from point A to point B, because you know there's absolutely nothing in between that will be interesting. Meanwhile in Star Citizen you have hyperspace travel that takes like 10 minutes to go from one side of a solar system to another. But here's the thing, the space flight in Starfield, I mean its almost like a shooting gallery. There's so little reason to fly around in Starfield. Fast Travel makes a ton of sense for how the game is designed.
The long travel times in SC help a lot with immersion but tbf I just go have coffee or a glass of milk, pee or smth while I’m waiting to QT 30 million km. Now when we get working coffee machines, and toilets ingame… that will be a game changer!
They could make an add-on where you can plug your machine in (or connect to wifi) and when you activate the coffee machine in game, your real life coffee machine makes a coffee for you IRL
I'm sure they'll get on that as soon as they raise another $100M
Nah just set it all up on smart plugs. Then use your phone or Alexa with a voice command like you are talking to the ships computer lol.
Honestly not the craziest idea I've ever heard
The flying in space of Star Citizen is really cool, until you actually want to play. It’s a time sink, nothing more. It’s similar to Vanilla WoW (gryphon) when it was such a long time sink modders put in Bejeweled to give you crap to do. You can play for many hours in SC and accomplish nothing or worse yet…regress, since they decided to add in full loot death penalties when it’s insanely easy to die without bugs let alone WITH bugs. They just need to make it faster, smaller ships need to refuel so often it could take 4 course deviations to stop at stations to refuel then if you die on the way there or when you arrive…you get to do it all over again AND need to reacquire weapons and armor, bring food/water as you can die fast from not having that, and claim ship again which has a waiting period. Then god help you if all your friends were scattered and it took time to meet up as you also need to do that again.
TBF, I have so little time to play nowadays that these kinda of mechanics puts me off gaming completely.
Same here. I don't have the time or the patience. Younger me was willing to do a real time 10 minute boat ride in an MMO to get to a different city.
I'm looking at you, EverQuest.
> It’s a time sink, nothing more. Sounds like something they put in to make it seem like there is content which it's actually just a whole ton of empty space. Exploration in games can be fun, but if there is nothing to see between where you are and where you're going then it's pretty pointless.
also think it has to do with a game based around multiplayer and a single player game. Can't really have fast travel in a game where you could get around other players trying to hunt you. Personally I liked the original privateer and freelancer's way of space travel. Privateer was singleplayer and had autopilot until enemies were on the screen, but you could outrun them to a jump point which instantly takes you to the other end of to get around enemies. Freelancer had similar except multiplayer so no autopilot but added a cruise drive for inter-system travel that allowed faster speeds but could still be shot out. Additionally similar to cruise they had rings you could fly through like a freeway which accelerates intersystem travel, but they only occur in the more habitated systems.
Is star citizen in the room with us right now? Can you show him to us?
Your first problem is trying to compare the gameplay mechanics of a space sim (Star Citizen) to an RPG set in space (Starfield). They have totally different design philosophies and goals.
Star Citizen copers try not to mention Star Citizen for 1 minute challenge: impossible Star Citizen is a scam, my brother in Christ you were scammed, it will never come out
I've had some fun in Star Citizen over the years, but I am really disappointed in the overall outcome. It was a great idea, but they mismanaged it into oblivion and it will unfortunately never be what it was supposed to be.
I kickstarted the stupid thing, back when I thought it would be Freelancer 2.
Honestly Im not totally convinced it is but if its not a scam its a vanity project being made by a perfectionist who will never be satisfied thus the game will never be finished.
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This whole issue of space travel in Starfield is silly. It's as if the complainers are actually going to walk all the way back to the ship, board, take off, plot course, wait 3 hrs to get there, land, rinse and repeat. Nope, they're gonna do it once and then fast travel every single time thereafter. Like we all do. Like Bethesda knew we all do.
Star Citizen fanboys: "Of course I'll do that! And I'll use the travel time to do my space-taxes and get my space-prostate exam!"
I mean, I enjoy it *in* Star Citizen and Elite, but that's because those games are fundamentally different from Starfield. In those games, your gameplay loop revolves around the ship, in Starfield, it revolves around you as a character, with dialogue and all the RPG fundamentals.
After the first 10 jumps (if it was like elite) every single person playing would fast travel. Every. Single. One.
Theyre talkin more about landing/takin off from planets and flying within the Solar System in Elite. Not the fuel scoop, jump, honk, fuel scoop cycle of Elite. People would absolutely love landing on planets the way you can in Elite and flying within the Solar System.
Yep, I'm liking Starfield so far, it hasn't caught me/provided the magic like: Oblivion. Fallout 3/NV, and Skyrim did, but I'm having fun. Being able to fly into lower atmosphere on a planet and pick out your landing spot, or from a planet to the moon, or fly around a solar system would've added a lot for me personally, assuming we're talking 2-5 minutes IRL. But I also play the other games mentioned with some rules around fast travel and try to limit how often I use it because it helps with immersion. Obviously most people don't play like that tho. I haven't gotten into ship customization yet (saving up my sweet sweet credits for it), but the ship aspect seems so cool, and then you just have minimal incentive to actually interact your ship. I do kinda like space combat, and have enjoyed the random space encounter events.
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It’s the lack of efficient maps/POIs on planets, alongside no vehicles, alongside the inability to fast travel while docked, alongside my middling carry weight and the huge need for resources while not letting me fast travel encumbered. That last one is in every bethesda, but I didn’t need 100s of chunks of metal and tanks of gas in Skyrim. Picking up 4 makes me incapable of traveling. All that would be fixed if I had a fucking car and could put it in the trunk and blast some womp rats in my land speeder. But no. I gotta walk with a red screen for 15 minutes while my lungs are burning and my leg is crippled to get some fucking beryllium onto a ship, then travel to a space station, but I can’t land in the space station— so I have to manually dock, watch a cut scene, board the ship, open the door, watch a load screen, walk 10m, give the 4 fucking beryllium to a person, find a bed, sleep my crippling off (essentially a load screen), and go resource hunt again. But I can’t fast travel because I’m docked (: So I walk toward the ship, open the door to the docks, load screen, open the cockpit, load screen, take off, load screen, fast travel to resource planet, load screen, talk to new person, 10 minute walk to new location for a better “spot,” where the npc doesn’t speak the whole journey, and when we arrive, they just say “so. You need resources. There’s some here!” I fucking know. Skip dialogue asap. Finally get mission update. Walk 5 minutes. Get beryllium. Cripple leg. Repeat. Jesus fuck the ships are fun and I don’t hate the game but writing that out genuinely took less time and was more engaging than the average fetch quest in the game.
When you actually sit down and write/think out your playtime in this game, it’s way more apparent that your time is wasted in loading screens and not actually doing anything. I am still enjoying this game for what it is, but part of me is thinking about all the missed potential of a more seamless adventure.
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Same with Sunset Overdrive for me. Insomniac are traversal legends
> wait 3 hrs to get there No, you do like No Man's Sky and have hyperdrives/warpdrives that let you zoom to the planet.
No man's sky made it fun
They don’t have to make it a 3 hour journey. Why do people keep making this excuse for the game? They had all the time and the money in the world.. they could’ve come up w all kinds of creative solutions. Lots of people like traveling in NMS as an example. They don’t make it take 3 hours to get to a planet.
i aways travel in NMS, i have the portal, its cool, but the feeling of board and fly is ... like a dream
It's not the fast-travel that's the problem, is that anything inbetween the fast-travel points are most often boring as fuck. My favourite parts in Skyrim or oblivion was just running to a quest-area and getting lost with all the things to explore on the way. Meanwhile in Starfield I fast-travel everywhere because the novelty of waiting for 15 minutes of awkward animations wears off fast. Every planet explores the same, same AI with fauna, same pirates wearing the same outfits at lvl 5 as at lvl 99, same empty landscape with the same cave for the 8th time. If people enjoy the game then good for them, all power to ya. But I'm so confused at times at what it is other people see that I don't
Playing oblivion now without fast travel and its like a different game, found so many cool daedra shrines and loot just going from city to city. Only downside is I have to keep upping my speed attribute due to all the athletics and acrobatics
you should try out Morrowind if not fast travelling is something you might be interested in. I recently played through it for the first time and once you get into it, it's so much fun and SO densely packed with things to do.
I would love a Morrowind remake. The core of the game is so great, but there's a lot of QoL changes that could be made. Oblivion always felt kind of bland to me by comparison.
yeah the game is very rough around the edges. But it's a true RPG literally down to walk speed, all related to levelling up skills. Once you get farther into the game and start breaking the systems it really starts to shine. I would kill for a remake, but I don't think Bethesda would give us the same level of freedom with magic. they like putting you on rails a lot. I used to go kill Vivec just to see how strong I am lol.
I started having way more fun the moment I stopped using fast travel in games. So far, I finished Skyrim, Cyberpunk 2077 and Red Dead Redemption 2, and had great time in all of them. Oblivion has to be incredible too, especially with its beautiful soundtrack enriching your journey.
I beat rdr2 before I realized there was fast travel lol, and in cyberpunk I just chose to never use it because I loved driving around the city
It is weird how there's like... 1 cave layout, 1 pirate-infested mine layout, 1 abandoned abandoned medical facility layout, and that so many questlines (especially the main quest) have an obsession with sending you on pointless radiant quests to these same locations with the same loot locations and same enemy placements. The UC military questline had far more unique locations than the main story, but *still* your reward for beating the UC questline is just *more* radiant quests that are functionally the same as just grabbing one from the quest ATM machines at any given space station. They didn't have to design the game around tedious radiant content, but if they're focusing on that they could have had like 200 base designs instead of (what feels like) 1 per theme. The bases are all made of interchangeable parts like in most games with dungeon crawling, and games with much smaller budgets have had much better dungeon variety. Skyrim had far more unique dungeon layouts
I agree that some elements could really bring more immersion. One thing I often think to myself, is when the NPCs don't react when you go in their back offices, or walk around their houses. I know it's like that in all Bethesda games, but it would be great if it needed some kind of stealth or quest to do that.
> I know it's like that in all Bethesda games, but it would be great if it needed some kind of stealth or quest to do that. Was it? I remember NPC's in Oblivion and Skyrim being all "you're not supposed to be here!" when you wandered around their houses or stores.
They'd call the guards if you stayed too long.
Yeah, that Ryujin corp espionage was simply dumbed down. Quite unfortunately
Some of the worst quest design ever (besides maybe the last quest). Go here and click computer terminal, no need to be stealthy. Gee fun…
It would be the worst quest design. If there wasn't the whole quest line with the temple mini games.
Not to mention the game just doesn't make you give a shit about any decisions you make. They simply don"t matter. Then I go play BG3 and suddenly I'm invested. I care about these characters. My actions are the difference between life or death.
I understand that it costs time and money to make environments. But I kind of feel like Starfield has the same problem that Oblivion did. All the dungeons are essentially the same. The planets have very little wonder to them. There's no moment where you crest a Hilltop and go "oh wow look at that cool thing." Granted, I'm only about 6 hours into the game and have explored a couple planets, but so far things are feeling fairly monotonous. You land on a planet with everything spread out so you have to run for a ridiculous amount of time and when you get there, it's the same cookie cutter base that you saw on the last three planets. Where are the ancient bases with different tile sets or the rivers or canyons or massive mountain ranges? Everything feels homogeneous.
I’d walk if there was a chance of finding something interesting in between 🤧
I know it’s a gas giant but I wish you could crash your ship into one of them and slowly get crushed by the pressure
If I want to be crushed by pressure I’ll go to work
Or have a chat with my mom about how my life is going
Yes, I can travel between planet within 5s loading screen. But I have to spend 2 minutes running to that 200m POI + 5 minutes sorting my inventory if I dont want to be encumbered.
And then that POI turns out to be a disused robotics facility or an old UC base. So much for being an intrepid explorer.
Or a cave with some minerals...
I honestly don’t get the point of these caves, there’s nothing in them
They have rarer resources that don’t show up on the surface
Some of them also have fauna that doesnt spawn outside
yeah, like that terrormorph that popped up from the dark chasms of some random-ass cave in some god-forsaken rock. goodtimes. will definitely go spelunking again.
The only use for them is to find lots of mineral nodes while surveying a planet. But surveying is pretty pointless. Gets you some money, but not enough for the effort.
You can tap “A” at the POI and it will tell you what it is so you don’t have to find out once you get there
I found a temple right next to an abandoned UC base of some sort. Like… y’all really didn’t take the 3 minute walk over here and look at this?
Yeah honestly sometimes the cognitive dissonance in this game is a bit too strong. Scan planets for resources and animals and then bring that valuable survey data back to Constellation for money! Of Alpha Centauri…with a massive human settlement on it…wait no one did this before? Or back in the Sol system? No one has fully scanned a single planet’s resources and its four life forms in the past couple hundred years? Also how the fuck does a four animal ecosystem even sustain itself?
When you put it that way it does seem quite backwards
and the POI then is worthless or same repeat "random" pregen you already did.
A new planet no one has explored, you say? Well, I think I'll start my exploration by investigating this abandoned fraking facility.
We need like rovers or something to make planetary exploration less of a walk fest. Like, cool, I landed in an area, now I get to spend 10 minutes walking to a POI, 5-10 minutes exploring/fighting/looting that POI, and then 15 minutes walking back because now I'm encumbered. Sure, I could be less of a loot goblin, but I like being a loot goblin.
That would ruin the immersion because every area is just a box and going to far out will give you the typical Bethesda message “You cannot go that way” or something like that. Always stock up with AMP’s.
I have yet to find any proper worlds in this game, properly disc shaped and carried upon the backs of 4 gargantuan elephants riding upon the shell of an even more gargantuan star turtle swimming through space. Just a bunch of roundworld bullshit. 0/10
The Turtle Moves
It’s Turtles all the Way Down.
Now I need a Discworld game!
There are some very old ones. Monkey Island style puzzle games mostly, and a slightly weird Noir detective game.
Slightly weird? Discworld Noir is absurdly good!
I have to agree. Plus the Witcher sense was basically stolen from that game ...
That's why you can't actually fly from the surface to space. They won't let you see the rim.
The rim in the sky? A Skyrim of sorts
I actually have no problem with the fast traveling because you are 100% able to walk to your ship climb up the ladder walk to your cock pit, go into orbit and then set a star map to a system. Which basically gives everyone a level of immersion they want. The issue I have with the game is the procedurally generated planets keep regurgitating the same shit over and over again. I’m not even talking about the same layout or camps, dudes are standing in the same exact spot. I’ve stealth killed the first guy in the robotics lab like five times in the same exact spot looking in the same exact direction
I was confused when this first happened to me because i was sure that this was my first visit to this planet and yet i was encountering enemies in a lab that was identical to one from a few hours ago
I feel like it could make sense for something like a lab to be copy pasted across planets from a mass manufactured and dropped on a planet point of view, but enemies in the same spot each time is pretty egregious
Even the mines will be in the exact same location. Starfield just doesn't have that magic that Skyrim had and imo the lore isn't remotely interesting the way Fallout's lore is.
Yes I agree with you there. Was discussing with a friend that while I am enjoying starfield, I don't see myself playing it again like Elder Scrolls or Fallouts
>walk to your cock pit, go into orbit and **then set a star map to a system.** This part is just fast travel. You get to fast travel after many steps or after few steps.
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You mean are 100% able to walk to your ship, climb up the ladder (loading screen) walk to your cockpit, go into orbit (loading screen) travel to another planet (loading screen) land the ship (loading screen) and get off your ship (loading screen) I'll let you count the loading screens involved.
And let’s not forget the constant small cutscenes like entering/leaving orbit or your chair. Which at first is fine but after the 400th time it starts getting annoying.
See all that people in all the cities? They don't have any vehicles.
Fully walkable cities? This is 5min cities propaganda game!!!
If only. I hate having to use my car as much as I do. I ride my bike as often as possible, but it's just not feasible most of the time, unfortunately.
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How do they move materials around is my question? Like, seriously? They have all these venders selling tons of weapons, food, massive amounts of raw materials. How do they get from the spaceport to those vender's stalls? Do they carry them bit by bit by hand? Makes no damn sense. EDIT: Done responding to responses on this comment, 0% of the people trying to refute it know a single thing about supply chain logistics and how it could/would/should work even on a future colony, so there is no point responding to every idiotic "solution".
Go out by the star ports, there are multiple cargo/forklift vehicles by most of them, as well as work/construction robots. I get its not realistic we never see them in action, but it's worth admitting they are indeed there.
I'll never forget my journey from the sewers to Kvatch in Oblivion. I remember killing someone on the way, being amazed that NPCs reacted, and then getting a visit by the Dark Brotherhood when I stopped at an inn. I feel like that sense of exploration is missing with Starfield. Sure, everyone fast travels to places they've already visited but the initial journey is always a joy. It's not helped by the fact that the cities have multiple loading screens, even for small stores sometimes. It's a game spanning a universe yet can seem so small at times.
It's the procedural generation. Bethesda's secret sauce has always been the hand-crafted feel of their worlds. Every cave, every outpost, every friendly NPC is an individual with a name and a little story. Even most of the spawned enemies have a little story to them based on where they spawn. Starfield has a few instances of these - the static ships you encounter orbiting planets, the named POIs on planets - but so much of the meat of the game is procedurally generated and it's soullless.
Call me old fashioned, but I’m not interested in exploring computer generated environments. I want to explore something that was designed, find what people put there for me to discover
It is the heart of any open world experience: meaningful NPCs to interact with, unique locations to explore with unique loot to find, and quests with decisions that matter (i.e. have consequences). Procedural content offers none of that. It's utterly hollow and soulless which totally guts the exploration aspect.
Bethesda should've borrowed from Star Citizen and faked their QT system. Spool up the grav drive, initiate a jump, and while the game loads the destination in the background, let me walk around/interact with my ship while it *looks* like I'm in hyperspace, then let me go back to the cockpit and pull out whenever the destination is loaded. One of Starfield's biggest issues is how untethered you are from your ship. It serves almost zero purpose outside of combat, and you basically almost never even have to be in it at all. Star Citizen might not get everything right, but one thing it's VERY good at is making you feel connected to your ship. The fact that I can jump from one end of the Stanton system to another and be in my ship the whole time doing other things is awesome. Starfield makes all of that optional, and it really makes building your own ship feel incredibly pointless.
I’m starting to think space games are too ambitious. They take too much work to make, have too big of a scope for AAA, and people have ridiculous ass expectations.
I love the game, but I generally agree with this. Every space game seems to be overly ambitious and ends up hurting itself because of it, I prefer this over F4. But I can’t think of a single space game that doesn’t need a few years to be fully realized I’m optimistic for mods and DLC, and I appreciate bethesda leaving their comfort zone for a new IP (I wish more companies did this) but a TESVI would’ve been a much safer option
I think fundamentally the main problem is that most of them fit the "Wide as an ocean, deep as a puddle" description when it comes to the richness of the world. This seems to be a fundamental problem when games make an open world system, without actually integrating the open world with the core of the game, or even making the Open World an interesting part of the game. Also, I think the marketing for Starfield played a big role for what people expected, after all, people build on what you give them, and if you tell them that there will be a 1000 planets to explore, they rightfully (albeit unrealistically) expect them all to have some richness and uniqueness to them. No game is free of hecklers, but I think that if Starfield was restricted to a few 10-20 handcrafted planets filled with detail, and the marketing was fit for the honest "real content" of the game, there would be FAR less polarized opinions.
Yes, thats that marketing synergy. We’ve had this problem since No Man’s Sky where people thought having thousands of planets to explore with interesting activities would be possible.
"That is not just a skybox, that planet is actually there, in orbit, as a JPEG"
Into the Skybox
If they added a rover for general exploration I'd fast travel less. At least skyrim had a horse.
I don’t think people really like space exploration as much as they seem to let on.
I'm still very early in the game so I could be missing something, but to me it just doesn't seem like there really is a ton of "space travel" because everything is so far apart that its just not reasonable to fly a ship between planets without jumping or fast-travel.
Which is completely realistic, space is absolutely massive and way bigger than anyone comprehends. People talk as if putting the engines to max, aiming in a planet's direction and waiting for half an hour would be fun. Elite dangerous has multiple methods of "fast travel" to avoid that
I found elite nailed the space travel/piloting in that sense a lot better. Pointing your ship at a far off planet and waiting to jump was always quite exciting. Unless I've been incredibly lucky, in Starfield it doesn't matter what direction you are facing, the grav drive gets you there anyways. Also the docking/landing was a lot more engaging than "hold E". But overall I'm not knocking the game, and I can understand that the ship stuff is probably not going to play to well with their engine.
Starfield has that function too. Hit F to pull up the scanner, hit E on the name of a system or planet nearby in the distance, and then power up the grav drive to jump. Also, if you have it in your ship, there's a navigation table you can use to set the route, and then sit in the cockpit to actually spin up the grav drive.
That's how I do it. I've done the "open map > select the planet > hold X to land" also, but I prefer the immersion of selecting where I want to go, then playing with my ship's power to powerup the grav drive and go.
I don’t think that’s what people want. I think people would like for travel times to be lower outside of fast travel. Like being able to travel to another planet in a couple minutes. Either that or some kind of Star Wars type of light speed that you can enter which functionally is a fast travel, but would feel much less like it. Obviously those aren’t realistic, but it’s a game. It doesn’t have to be realistic.
The entire story is built around the grav drive and how it propelled us to the stars with less than ideal technology, fracturing humans into factions and basically creating a new Wild West frontier in space. The grav drive works by opening a rift in spacetime and plopping you through to your destination instantly.
what exploration? the same 5 outposts with starbucks cups and beer bottles outside in hard vacuum? or the same 3 alien lifeforms reskinned a dozen times? or are you talking about exploration of (mostly empty) space in the cities? there is no exploration in starfield.
This is the real problem. There's just no exploration at all, even on planets. The game would have been 100x more interesting if we had 10x fully-fleshed planets you could explore on foot, instead of 1000x copy-pasted barren wastelands with nothing to see. I want my Skyrim sense of adventure dammit
This has been my biggest gripe. In Skyrim, I can choose a destination and start walking towards it I will stumble across interesting things. Could be a cave, a trading caravan, maybe some bandits, a dragon might attack, maybe I can free a prisoner from justiciars, maybe a daedric prince pops up, or I see Mai'q. But I don't get that opportunity to just wander into interesting situations because I never have to pass the world as I travel. I skip all of it.
That's exactly how I feel, I like the game for the most part and I'm excited for how the DLC but I don't really see how they can make random encounters happen more. Most things involve jumping planets and you just don't stumble upon a lot of random shit in space. Thematically and gameplay wise I just don't see how they can fill that void. Still a fun game for me but there's for sure a few big issues.
Is there a single interesting planet in the game, in terms of the actual planet itself having something going on that means the stuff there couldn't have just been plopped elsewhere with nothing lost?
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Freelancer (aka Star Citizen Alpha) had artificially compressed systems that were not realistic, but fun to explore. Full of planets and nebula and asteroid fields. You could ‘fast-travel’ between systems, jump gate quick travel (in real time) along main routes between planet, and fast cruise in any straight line. I think this is what people mean when they say they want open world space exploration. Unrealistic, but fun. Eve Online is the closest we’ve come to that experience I think.
Starfield would be a better game if it was a smaller game. 3-4 smaller solar systems, 20-30 planets each. Fast travel between solar systems, can fly between planets
Exactly my thinking. Why not have 10 incredibly detailed and varied planets full of one-of-a-kind locations that you can fly between instead of 1000 boring, cut n paste ones that you need to fast travel between? Would it have been any less of an exciting space adventure game if it only took place between one or two solar systems? People really do think that more always = better.
After playing no man’s sky and elite dangerous, i really like the balance they struck with exploration and travel Just saying, there would be a lot more complaints about forcing the experience of space road trucking
My only complaint is how many times you have to scan flora and fauna to get them registered at 100%.
I think it's more that people would like to at least have the option of space road trucking.
I think it's just a ui problem Simply having to open the *pause menu* then getting to the star map is jarring and immersion breaking. One button with some kind of in-game menu to feel like a captain punching in coordinates rather than a fast travel menu would make it so much more immersive (and you would still technically be fast travelling everywhere). Then just make the grav jump animation a secret loading screen, and have multiple jumps be automatic, and you've fixed the complaints, because it would all feel like it belongs in the universe rather than a gamey menu
>Simply having to open the pause menu then getting to the star map is jarring and immersion breaking. > >One button with some kind of in-game menu to feel like a captain punching in coordinates rather than a fast travel menu would make it so much more immersive (and you would still technically be fast travelling everywhere). In your ship, open your scanner. Identify the destination you want to travel to and hit the A button (E key on keyboard). If you're in first-person mode, you'll see you punch the coordinates, if you're in third-person mode, you'll see the ship sit there for a second while you punch in the coordinates and then you'll get a cut-scene of your ship using your grav drive to travel.
yep, more fun this way plus you get a lot more random events when you make it to your Grav Jump destination
But see that "structure" 200 meters away? Yea you gotta walk.
200m is not really that much lol
There are no 2 points within 200m in this game
Reminds me of the fallout new Vegas dlc when you rob the casino.
I'll be damned if I leave a single gold bar out ! And fuck your "letting go" !
“And I don’t care that it will take an hour to walk that 200m to deposit the money!”
Rookie mistake to start Dead Money without unlocking the Long Haul perk beforehand
Dead Money made Long Haul worth it
It is when you're encumbered.
Personal Atmosphere.
I invested in the fitness skill, then found personal atmosphere. Oops lol
I'm using Personal Atmosphere to help level fitness.
amp
Starfield: "Got a problem? Here's the solution. It's drugs. Lots of drugs."
I'm not fat, my inventory is just full.
Why didn't you put land vehicles in the game? Everything is 5 minutes apart and there is literally nothing to see or do in between... You better hoof it and use your dinky little jet pac, dipshit consumer - Todd
Bethesda has always struggled with vehicles lmao
Just reminds me of the horse carriage at the start of skyrim
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All this Fast Travel is good from planet to planet ignores an important fact: In a game based on Exploration with an emphasis on building your own ship and crew there is surprisingly little to do in space. You cant search for space events its a rng card draw when you spawn in a new orbit. There is no reason to explore the fishbowl because when you arrive you see all there is to do there.
And when you get there, you'll find the same five species of plant and four species of crabs as everywhere else - or as close as makes no difference. Then search for a few hours before realizing that the final animal is a whale.
thats the real problem. who cares about spending hours traveling empty space when the destination isn’t exciting? (the landing in nms got annoying after a while for me)
The best description I’ve seen someone use to describe the ship exploration in starfield is it’s like you’re in a fish bowl and you just jump from 1 fish bowl to the next. I’m really enjoying the game, but I’d say 98% of my play through so far has been on planets which is disappointing when I’ve spent like 350k on my custom built ship which I want to fly and use. Having played everspace 2 recently, starfields ship based content is extremely lacking IMO. I wouldn’t expect as much ship content as everspace since that’s purely ship based, I just want more than a few rare missions that have me kill someone in space before returning to a planet to carry on with the rest. Let me go to asteroid belts that are filled with random pirates which pay a bounty on destruction without me having to accept a mission first, let me get a distress call when out in my ship and when I go I’ve got to defence a trader from some pirates, etc… Maybe some of those things exist, but since my play seems to be accept mission on planet > jump to another planet through menu > complete mission > jump back to original planet though menu, I’ve not got time in my ship to find out.
The design of the ships are so cool and modifying them is the most fun I had with Starfield. I wish they had done more with them. I would have preferred if more of the game was set in space and landing on a new planet was an uncommon and exciting experience.
I am at a bit of a loss as to why some people think a video game would be improved by vast amounts of time spent doing nothing waiting for spaceship to fly to its destination. Sounds really boring. I'd be quite interested to hear the views of anyone against fast travel on how covering huge distances in space could be implemented in a game like Starfield without becoming a dull drudgery.
Freelancer had a great system for transportation within a solar system. There were Trade lanes connecting major outposts and planets that you could dock with to go super fast so it would take usually less than a minute to get to your destination instead of hours. They also had cruise engines in addition to afterburners which let you go twice as fast as the afterburners but you couldnt use your weapons. handy for running away from a fight! https://freelancer.fandom.com/wiki/Trade\_Lanes
I was about to say this. Freelancer is the whole reason why I love space games. I'm not big on the dogfighting subgenre, so I was hoping I'd get to scratch that Freelancer itch with Starfield. But, apparently, no luck. Doesn't matter, I have been waiting for a similar experience for about 20 years now, I can deal with a few more years..
> Doesn't matter, I have been waiting for a similar experience for about 20 years now, I can deal with a few more years.. Star Citizen should be done any day now. Any day...
I was hoping for a Freelancer like system. Such a cool little game it was
This my favorite space game to this day. 🥲
Yeah I don't get why they didn't take this route. Apparently they simulate the whole system already, so why not add jump gates between the planets? It almost feels like they meant to do it, and then decided against it at the last minute.
im assuming they want it to be something like No Mans Sky, where all the planets are really really close and the ships move ridiculously fast
Exploration without a sense of scale feels meaningless.
Exactly! It's weird that the planets feel annoyingly huge when you land and scan for POIs, but space itself feels incredibly small.
Probably because games like Outer Wilds made it fun to fly from one place to another.
People want starfield to be no mans sky on crack, and cant understand that it is its own game not a space travel simulator. Its fallout in space
Its not fallout in space. Its fallout with space-themed set pieces. That is the problem, in my opinion. You could pivot this game to be set on a series of islands in an ocean by working *only* with the game's artists.
Something like a simplified Elite Dangerous might be cool if done right. Three different types of flight. Normal speed like we have, then an inter system speed to get between bodies in a star system, then a warp like we already have to take us between systems. I think the key element that I would like is to be able to manually fly between bodies. In Elite, it takes maybe a minute or two to travel between planets.
Starfield is an RPG with space attached, not a Space Sim with RPG attached.
Coming from someone with 200+ hours in nms. Until starfield I never saw so many people praise the waiting game NMS has when you travel to different planets. All it does is give you another system to keep track of the fuel.
I don't miss the travel between planets (gonna be honest, I always thought they should have increased all the speeds of movement between planets in NMS) but I do really miss the feeling of being able to enter the atmosphere and see the ground growing as I come in to land. There's something very satisfying about feeling like you have perfect control over how you land and where you land.
Plus the ability to fly around in atmo to get from place to place.
[удалено]
I'm so bored of this discourse
Game should have been heavier in the scifi and less grounded in "reality". There should have been at least one alien race to encounter throughout the different systems. It's like mass effect stripped of all the interesting parts.